The Pink Panther 2

1starGo to showtimes

Published 6:30 am, Friday, February 6, 2009

Steve Martin reprises his role as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther 2.

Steve Martin reprises his role as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther 2.

Photo: Sony Pictures

The Pink Panther 2

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

France can take it. France can always take it — whatever silliness the world is apt to dish out, whether it’s freedom fries or franco-bashing. After 46 years of putting up with the klutzy Inspector Jacques Clouseau and his stupid accent, French audiences will likely roll their eyes at The Pink Panther 2and calmly return to their cheese plates. American audiences are advised to do the same.

The Pink Panther series was never about France, anyway. At the very beginning, it was supposed to be about David Niven in a smoking jacket, but audiences didn’t care much for his character and latched onto Clouseau instead. After that, Blake Edwards’ joyously nonsensical comedies became vehicles for the man beneath the mustache: Peter Sellers. At their peak, they exploited Sellers’ gift for well-timed pomposity and just let him rip, turning the best scenes into artfully paced ballets of slapstick absurdism. The idiot detective believed himself to be smart and smooth and canny; most of the comedy rose from this self-delusion and the fact that almost everyone else regarded him as a dunce of the lowest order. Half the fun was watching their reaction shots as Sellers inevitably — with an almost Zen-like calm — broke stuff, mangled stuff and screwed stuff up.

There is nothing inevitable or Zen about The Pink Panther 2. It offers pratfalls and mayhem and lots of energetic pinch-mouthed mugging on the part of its star, Steve Martin, who also stares down his nose and walks with a little mincing wiggle. For all that effort I only laughed hard twice: once at the beginning, when the besieged Chief Inspector Dreyfus (John Cleese) learns that Clouseau’s been tapped to lead a "dream team" of international detectives and removes to the bathroom for a cathartic head-bash; and once later on, when Clouseau dresses in papal robes and dangles off a balcony in Vatican City.

The story, true to form, revolves around the theft of the famed Pink Panther diamond, which has been lost more times in more movies than Al Pacino’s temper. In this latest go-round a few additional items have been stolen as well: the Magna Carta, the Shroud of Turin and the Imperial Sword of Japan.

Enter the dream team of gumshoes, who include Alfred Molina as a vain Brit, Andy Garcia as an oh-so-suave Italian (is it me, or does he spend half his life in cravats?) and Yuki Matsuzaki as a techno-savvy Japanese. Arriving late is Aishwarya Rai Bachchan as the flirty author of a book on the Tornado, a legendary thief and the case’s chief suspect.

Directed by Harald Zwat (Agent Cody Banks) from a screenplay by Martin, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, The Pink Panther 2 is blander, busier and less amusing than the first Martin reboot, 2006’s The Pink Panther. Not coincidentally, it’s also a brazen rip-off of 1975’s The Return of the Pink Panther — if you’ve seen that one, you’ll know where this one’s headed. Even if you haven’t seen that one, you’ll know where this one’s headed.

But for all the obvious cribbing, the filmmakers still seem ill-at-ease with Clouseau’s simplistic world view and frank buffoonery. He remains a sexist-racist-egotistical nincompoop, but his sexism and racism are corrected with sensitivity training (by Lily Tomlin, sad to say) and his egotism is fanned by adoring sidekicks (Jean Reno and Emily Mortimer, reprising their roles). Even worse, they have cause to adore him: He’s a simply ingenious detective.

Forgive me, but I don’t get this new Clouseau. The beauty of the guy has always been his gift for falling upward, solving cases despite his blindered tendency to trash crime scenes, and people, with lordly dignity. In Pink 2, he gets the trashing part right, but he’s far too clever and twitchy, and far less memorable as a result. He bumbles toward nothing but irrelevancy. And you just might forget him before it’s over.